play is form

I want to describe to you a kind of game that I like to play, and a kind of game that I want to play. 

https://letterclub.games/2021/05/01/haiku-games/

Bogost’s PLAY ANYTHING attempts to define play as an act of appreciation and acceptance of a new perspective, through living it. Playgrounds are boundaries inscribed around materials, and to play is to engage with the materials contained within.

1. Gameplay is engaging with a created material.

Videogames are not simulacra of other things. To pretend that they are is akin to Bogost’s irony — distancing oneself from something and engaging with a false version of it, rather than the real thing.

To play a fishing videogame is distinct from the act of fishing.

But, to draw the conclusion, because fishing is real and a fishing videogame is not fishing, that the activity of playing a fishing videogame is therefore false or invalid is missing the point.

A fishing videogame is just as real as fishing.

2. Form and content.

Missing a kick
at the icebox door
It closed anyway
-Jack Kerouac

This is an example of modern haiku that our Jack (i.e. not Kerouac) shared with me. Consider its form and its content as separate entities:

Its form: Ten words, three lines, “modern haiku,” contains the word icebox, written by Jack Kerouac. These are all realities of the material of the poem which might be played with.

Its content: To me it evokes a particular feeling of laughing at myself. A pointless little failure that ends in futility. This is not a reality of the material of the poem, but it makes me think about a real event that might have happened to me. This thought is a material which might be played it.

In short: form is the ‘material’ of the poem, while content is the ‘material’ produced by the poem, in concert with the reader, in the reader’s own mind.

3. All play is activity; all activity is form.

When considering the literal act of play, or of participating in any activity: the activity, your participation in it, and you, are all part of the form.

4. Meaning is content.

“I want to discover beauty about the world – my world – through play. Beauty of a natural flavor, rather than the mathematical beauty you can find within systems themselves. I want the games to be brief, like HAIKU, and leave me with some space to find some meaning for myself. I want the games to have helped me learn something about me, in my world.” – Jack, HAIKU games

Jack asks, “What is the minimal form of games that can do this?”

The “mathematical beauty [of the] systems themselves” is a beauty of form, while “some space to find some meaning for myself [..] something about me, in my world” is a beauty of content.

5. Form-content assonance.

I can look at Kerouac’s haiku and connect its form to its content and, in fact, I think it holds up under this light in a beautiful way. The form of the frivolous ten-word poem is in line with the casual futility of the minor failure it describes.

But it’s also very possible to enjoy these aspects in isolation.

6. Are games the art of ego?

Earlier, in point 3, I said “When considering the literal act of play, or of participating in any activity: the activity, your participation in it, and you, are all part of the form.”

As I’ve experienced it, videogames discourse often focuses on the form-content assonance when it considers the content at all; more often the focus lands firmly on the side of form.

Perhaps we just have enough ideas expressed through other art forms, or maybe I just run with form-obsessed circles.

But I wonder whether a part of the fuzzy definition of games, as in GAMEFEEL games, as in WALKING SIMULATORS AREN’T games, as in GAMEPLAY… but most importantly as in “why do people care about games, this art form, in particular?”… is ego.

As in, Does the form include ME?

~

P.S. Maybe I should have worded things differently (I apologize for evoking this awful aeons-old argument), but I’m not so interested in making a stand in the semantic definition of “What are games?” as am I interested in how this lens can be used, perhaps anthropologically, to look at extant discussions & disagreements. Is there a rift between “ego-centric” and “non-ego-centric” perspectives on games? Does this mirror anything in other art forms?